[5] This year “American Party” became the official name. Its strength in Congress was almost thirty-fold that of 1852. It elected governors, legislatures, or both, in four New England states, and in Maryland, Kentucky and California; minor officers elsewhere; and almost won six Southern states.
[6] For it delayed anti-slavery organization in the North, and presumably discouraged immigration, which was a source of strength to the North rather than to the South.
[7] They carried only Maryland. The popular vote in the North was under one-seventh, in the South above three-sevenths, of the total vote cast.
[8] Note the presidential vote. Seward’s loss of the Republican nomination was partly due to Know Nothing hostility.
[9] Its firmest hold was in Maryland. Its rule in Baltimore (1854-1860) was marked by disgraceful riots and abuses.
KNOX, HENRY (1750-1806), American general, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, of Scottish-Irish parentage, on the 25th of July 1750. He was prominent in the colonial militia and tried to keep the Boston crowd and the British soldiers from the clash known as the Boston massacre (1770). In 1771 he opened the “London Book-Store” in Boston. He had read much of tactics and strategy, joined the American army at the outbreak of the War of Independence, and fought at Bunker Hill, planned the defences of the camps of the army before Boston, and brought from Lake George and border forts much-needed artillery. At Trenton he crossed the river before the main body, and in the attack rendered such good service that he was made brigadier-general and chief of artillery in the Continental army on the following day. He was present at Princeton; was chiefly responsible for the mistake in attacking the “Chew House” at Germantown; urged New York as the objective of the campaign of 1778; served with efficiency at Monmouth and at Yorktown; and after the surrender of Cornwallis was promoted major-general, and served as a commissioner on the exchange of prisoners. His services throughout the war were of great value to the American cause; he was one of General Washington’s most trusted advisers, and he brought the artillery to a high degree of efficiency. From December 1783 until June 1784 he was the senior officer of the United States army. In April 1783 he had drafted a scheme of a society to be formed by the American officers and the French officers who had served in America during the war, and to be called the “Cincinnati”; of this society he was the first secretary-general (1783-1799) and in 1805 became vice-president-general. In 1785-1794 Knox was secretary of war, being the first man to hold this position after the organization of the Federal government in 1789. He urged ineffectually a national militia system, to enroll all citizens over 18 and under 60 in the “advanced corps,” the “main corps” or the “reserve,” and for this and his close friendship with Washington was bitterly assailed by the Republicans. In 1793 he had begun to build his house, Montpelier, at Thomaston, Maine, where he speculated unsuccessfully in the holdings of the Eastern Land Association; and he lived there until his death on the 25th of October 1806.
See F. S. Drake, Memoir of General Henry Knox (Boston, 1873); and Noah Brooks, Henry Knox (New York, 1900) in the “American Men of Energy” series.
KNOX, JOHN (c. 1505-1572), Scottish reformer and historian. Of his early life very little is certainly known, in spite of the fact that his History of the Reformation and his private letters, especially the latter, are often vividly autobiographical. Even the year of his birth, usually given as 1505, is matter of dispute. Beza, in his Icones, published in 1580, makes it 1515; Sir Peter Young (tutor to James VI. of Scotland), writing to Beza from Edinburgh in 1579, says 1513; and a strong case has been made out for holding that the generally accepted date is due to an error in transcription (see Dr Hay Fleming in the Bookman, Sept. 1905). But Knox seems to have been reticent about his early life, even to his contemporaries. What is known is that he was a son of William Knox, who lived in or near the town of Haddington, that his mother’s name was Sinclair, and that his forefathers on both sides had fought under the banner of the Bothwells. William Knox was “simple,” not “gentle”—perhaps a prosperous East Lothian peasant. But he sent his son John to school (no doubt the well-known grammar school of Haddington), and thereafter to the university, where, like his contemporary George Buchanan, he sat “at the feet” of John Major. Major was a native of Haddington, who had recently returned to Scotland from Paris with a great academical reputation. He retained to the last, as his History of Greater Britain shows, the repugnance characteristic of the university of Paris to the tyranny of kings and nobles; but like it, he was now alarmed by the revolt of Luther, and ceased to urge its ancient protest against the supremacy of the pope. He exchanged his “regency” or professorship in Glasgow University for one in that of St Andrews in 1523. If Knox’s college time was later than that date (as it must have been, if he was born near 1515), it was no doubt spent, as Beza narrates, at St Andrews, and probably exclusively there. But in Major’s last Glasgow session a “Joannes Knox” (not an uncommon name, however, at that time in the west of Scotland) matriculated there; and if this were the future reformer, he may thereafter either have followed his master to St Andrews or returned from Glasgow straight to Haddington. But till twenty years after that date his career has not been again traced. Then he reappears in his native district as a priest without a university degree (Sir John Knox) and a notary of the diocese of St Andrews. In 1543 he certainly signed himself “minister of the sacred altar” under the archbishop of St Andrews. But in 1546 he was carrying a two-handed sword in defence of the reformer George Wishart, on the day when the latter was arrested by the archbishop’s order. Knox would have resisted, though the arrest was by his feudal superior, Lord Bothwell; but Wishart himself commanded his submission, with the words “One is sufficient for a sacrifice,” and was handed over for trial at St Andrews. And next year the archbishop himself had been murdered, and Knox was preaching in St Andrews a fully developed Protestantism.